Marooned on a sea of superficiality

Rating: 3/10 (12 April 2007)

The Island reinforces just how bad a film director Michael Bay can be. The previous low water mark was his ability to turn the most traumatic and emotive event in American history (the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour) into a three hour snoozefest.
The Island is not anywhere near as soporific, but is deeply banal. Somewhere deep in its core there is an interesting sci-fi idea and perhaps even an ethical dilemma to be addressed. But its smothered under endless pop-video stylings, an insipid screenplay, interminable and overblown action sequences and actors struggling to offer performances and create characters in the director's entirely two-dimensional universe.
Bay is the apotheosis of the bad director, the prime role in the malign ecosystem of American cinema with bad films being created to feed the appetite of audiences conditioned to bad, but expensive movies. The tradition of the blockbuster began in the 1970s, when the movies retained some measure of substance and the director's were somewhat talented and idealistic. 'Product' like The Island can only be the product of cynical, tired and unchallenged minds. Having said all that, the film had as bad a run at the American box office as everywhere else, so perhaps audiences retain a modicum of good taste.
The product placement begins almost before the initial credits have rolled as Lincoln Six Echo rummages around for his missing Puma tennis shoe. We see he appears to be living in the near future in a post-apocalyptic refuge which appears to be a hybrid of a David Lloyd health Club and a city centre shopping mall.
Inmates are subject to dietary, exercise and strict no touching rules, ostensibly for their own health but, as eventually revealed, because they are nothing more than organ donors to be harvested for rich clients as required.
That's the interesting bit over with. Inevitably, they are able to escape about half way through the movie (the envy) to find they are actually living in a bunker somewhere in the desert and a short maglev train ride to L.A. Why maglev trains stop at one-horse desert towns is not made clear. Whatever the explanation, it's more plausible than the idea that an industrial holocaust on this scale could go undetected whilst apparently staffed casually by locals.
The second half of the movie is a series of very long, headache- inducing action sequences which, predictably, the pair survive. Ewan McGregor also has a narcissistic episode when meeting his clone double - an opportunity the film can't be bothered to make more of. I have no issues with action movies, but can I have a bun with my burger? The ending requires, of course, that the whole dystopian edifice is torn down, providing another FX extravaganza. Personally, I thought the whole model-based sequence for Logan's Run in 1976 was more interesting to look at.
The Island steals heavily from Logan's Run, and THX 1138 and is in many ways as much a pastiche of movie dystopian features as it is a rehash of the style used by Bay in previous movies.
And there is no Island. It's just an illusion.